How Transit can Support Better Intercity Rail Service for Pittsburgh

Pittsburgh may soon be getting additional intercity rail service. The Pennsylvania state rail plan for 2020 includes a second state funded daily train from Pittsburgh to New York city through Harrisburg and Philadelphia starting in 2023. Amtrak is also developing a proposal for additional federally funded rail service in Ohio including additional train service from Cleveland to New York City through Pittsburgh.

If implemented, this would represent a huge improvement to Pittsburgh rail service. In order to ensure the service improvement is a success, the Port Authority should improve integration of local transit with Amtrak’s rail service.

Good, integrated local transit is a necessary condition for frequent intercity rail service to be viable. The reason is that parking takes up too much space for enough passengers to reach the station by car. Trains can carry more passengers than an airplane, and in cities with successful rail transportation, the train stations have significantly more daily passengers than the airport. The following image shows what would happen if the Pittsburgh airport parking lot were built next to the Pittsburgh train station. There would be no space left for downtown!

Downtown if the Amtrak Station had as much Parking as the Airport

The Pittsburgh airport has 13,000 parking spaces. A comparison of this with rail capacity shows that even a parking lot this size would not supply enough passengers for good rail service. The Pennsylvanian train from Pittsburgh to New York has 5 Amfleet coaches with a capacity of 84 passengers each. Trains can be longer than this, the Capitol Limited which runs from Pittsburgh to Chicago has 9 cars, including sleepers. Assuming all passengers drive to the train station, the average stay at the destination is one week, and the train length was limited to 5 cars, Pittsburgh would only supply enough passengers to fill 4.4 trains a day, or 1857 daily boardings.

$\frac{13,000\ \textrm{passengers}}{7\ \textrm{days}\times84\frac{\textrm{passengers}}{\textrm{carriage}}\times5\frac{\textrm{carriages}}{\textrm{train}}}=4.4\frac{\textrm{trains}}{\textrm{day}}$

Since other stations on the route would supply passengers too, 1857 daily boardings in Pittsburgh would be able to support more than 5 daily trains. If 20% of boardings on a typical route were in downtown Pittsburgh, 1857 daily boardings would be able to support 22 daily trains with 5 carriages. Longer trains would be more cost effective, but this would reduce the number of trains at this ridership level. 22 daily trains is still mediocre by international standards. For example, Edinburgh Scotland, which has a smaller metro population than Pittsburgh, has 70,000 average daily passengers at its train station.

Since train stations are quieter and more space efficient than airports, they can be sited downtown. This makes them closer to most traveler’s origins and destinations, reducing travel time relative to flying. However, realizing this benefit makes parking more expensive. Parking takes a huge amount of space, and the opportunity costs for downtown land is high because there are so many alternate productive uses. Building parking garages is expensive, and not a good use of public money.

Therefore, a high transit mode share for station access is absolutely necessary for enough ridership for frequent, cost effective service.

Here is What the Port Authority should do:

Pittsburgh Union Station has excellent access to existing public transit infrastructure.  It is directly adjacent to the Penn Station stop on the East Busway, a short walk from steel plaza subway station, and within access of numerous other bus lines that serve downtown Pittsburgh. The Oakland-Downtown BRT Project will soon improve station access from Uptown, Oakland, Squirrel Hill, Shadyside, and other East end neighborhoods. These assets can be leveraged to support better rail service.

There are several straightforward changes that the Port Authority can make to improve integration with rail service:

1. Better Schedule Coordination Between the Port Authority and Amtrak: Before the pandemic Pittsburgh had a daily train to Washington DC that departed at 5:20 am. The train now only runs three days a week, but hopefully service will be restored when ridership recovers. There are no buses that run early enough for someone to reliably make this train, even on the busiest bus routes like the P1 and 61. The earliest P1 arrives downtown at 5:08 am, which does not allow enough time for a passenger to be confident they would make the connection.

Additionally, bus routes that don’t run on weekends could have limited weekend service that is coordinated with the arrival and departure schedule for the Pennsylvania train.

2. Overnight Parking Served by Transit: None of the Port Authority’s park and rides have overnight parking. Overnight parking should be available so people who cannot walk to transit can ride to the train station or the airport. It is important that the Port Authority charge for this parking, but it should be possible to cover the cost of this parking with fees while charging less than for overnight parking at the airport or downtown by the train station.
3. Add a Connect Card Vending Machine to the Station:  There are two ways to pay for a PAT bus: a Connect Card that Pittsburgh visitors typically don’t have, or with exact change.  Many people today don’t have cash or otherwise have trouble obtaining exact change.  Cash customers also don’t get a discount on transfers.  While there are connect card vending machines at the nearby Busway and subway stations, these are not easy to find for Pittsburgh visitors and are out of the way for visitors using any other bus route. The Pittsburgh Airport has a Connect Card machine, the train station should too.
4. Improve Wayfinding for Public Transit: Figuring out which bus route to take can sometimes be challenging to figure out for Pittsburgh residents.  It’s even harder if you’re a visitor.  This could easily be addressed by adding maps of the bus and light rail routes that are most accessible from the train station.

These improvements would all be cost effective to implement.  Making it easier for visitors to use transit will reduce the number of cars on Pittsburgh’s streets, improving safety, and reducing pollution and congestion. Making it easier for riders to take transit to the train station would improve intercity rail transportation, allowing for better frequencies and service.